"I ship Robin/Starfire!" "I ship Sonic/Blaze!" "My favorite coupling is Knuckles/Sally!"

What does any of that, well... "mean?" The meaning of the phrase "I ship X/Y" has clearly evolved past just rooting for them to get together on the show/comic/etc., since people ship impossible, non-canon, and even fanfictional couples.
Very often things slip into metafiction, i.e., not just about the fictiona show but on top of that hypothetical fictional secenarios are discussed as having some validity: "If Terra hadn't been turned to stone, Beast Boy would have chosen Raven anyway."

What is your impression of this phrase? Does it mean "I hope this will become canon" or is it that plus something else, or is it something else entirely?

What is the, well, point to this? Why is it fun?

EDIT: Re: topic placement: Let's put this here and start it off as Sonic couples, if people branch off substantially into non-Sonic couples we can move it somewhere else.

I look forward to seeing responces to this, as I don't get people "shipping" couples between characters that wouldn't even know who the other was even if they were wearing a "Hello, my name is" tag...

However, in my experiences, I also don't think I'll find the answers I'm looking for, because the people who tend to make those sort of ships (and usually they have like 20 of them for each series) also tend to be the type of people who seem to be unable to type thought-out posts that make coherant points within them... Maybe there's part of the reason behind that style of shipping. Youthful eccentricity. :LOL:

I would tend to disagree with your "youthful eccentricity" idea there, DP. While I think there is a lot of that, there are at least some ships held by very intelligent people who acknowledge their impossibility but ship them anyway. Case in point: the snooty dasbarts over at ForbiddenLove, the Robin/Raven shrine.
Jerks? Yes. Intelligent? Yes. Knowingly ship stupid ship? Yes.

It'll be interesting to see if people like that ship what they do for the same reasons the people you described ship as they do, or if they both do so for different reasons.

I'm not talking about "ships" between characters who know each other. As I said in my post, I don't understand "ships" involving characters who have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Like "shipping" (on the subject of Sonic stuff) a Sally/that-evil-guy-that-could-transform-into-things-from-Sonic-Underground pairing; or (not as much on the subject of Sonic stuff) one pairing I remember reading someone liked that made just as much sense, a Garra/Cosmo "shipping" (as in, the sand dude in Naruto and the plant girl from Sonic X).

...

I'm not really much of a "shipper" type of person (I'd say pretty much, the closest to a "shipping" pairing I have is probably Ichigo/Rukia from Bleach, or Allen/Lenalee from D.Gray-man), but in some cases I'm more of a person who "supports" the extended interaction between characters. Basically what that means is, I like seeing scenes where certain characters have to interact with each other, as those characters together in a scene usually makes for an entertaining scene to myself, due to how they act and react to eachother/situations (examples for myself: Botan and Yusuke from YYH, Train and Eve from Black Cat).

That might be part of what's going on with the people you're talking about in the above post. But that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. :p

...

Oh yeah... Mikuru/tears 4 evah! XD

Some notable couples that have made me sick?

VidelxBroly
Videlx#17

What the hell, people?

I swear, some DBZ fans are worse than the majority of Sonic fans. And thats really, really bad.

Anywho... I have to guiltily admit that I've always been a supporter of the outrageous pairing of Blossom and Dexter... and believe it or not, that was before I ever even read Bleedman's PPGD comic. I'm not delusional in thinking it could ever canonically happen (for one, both shows have been canceled for years), but I always did get the impression that if a Dexter/PPG crossover were to ever take place (which could logically happen, as it has been proven that both series inhabit the same universe), that those two characters might like one another. It's more of a hypothetical sort of thing, since the characters are very similar in several ways. Okay, fine, throw tomatoes at me if you must, but I swear that's the only ship I support that's totally out there. Other than that, I can't say I've ever done any cross-series shipping. That one would be the only exception and most cross-series ships really confuse the heck outta me.

As for shipping in general (as in, characters within the same series), I usually wouldn't ship people that don't even know each other... or, more to the point, I tend to just go with whatever seems to be canon. If there's one thing that's always confused me, it's people that denounce a canon ship (one that the author very obviously intends) in favor of a whack-job ship that makes no sense. Why contradict the author?

I dunno... to me, a lot of shippers out there do seem to be rather insane. Especially the ones that are constantly grasping at straws (hoo-boy, Digimon shippers are notorious for this) to convince people that two characters that are actually indifferent to each other are somehow hiding deep feelings of love for one another. Often times these nut cases will be saying things like, "Look! They're standing next to each other!" or "ZOMG! He asked her a question! He could have asked any of the others, but he didn't! He asked HER! It MUST be love!" (btw, I'm not exaggerating with those, either... those are actually closer to true examples than you might think)